A Message From the Gods: Keep ‘Lightning Thief’ Fans Happy

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/07/theater/lightning-thief-musical-broadway.html

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There’s one thing the team behind “The Lightning Thief: The Percy Jackson Musical” wants to make abundantly clear. “Maybe you’ve heard of a movie with a similar title,” the show’s Twitter account warns. “We’re not that.”

It is not “The Lightning Thief,” the 2010 film that Rotten Tomatoes granted a mediocre 49 percent — or the sequel that scored even lower. The film that The New York Times called “flat and mechanical” with a title character who was “blandly appealing.” The film that plunged Rick Riordan into despair.

“If I were intentionally trying to sabotage this project,” Mr. Riordan wrote, “I doubt I could have done a better job than this script.” He would know. He wrote the best-selling Percy Jackson series on which the film was (loosely) based.

So when the musical — now in previews for an Oct. 16 opening at the Longacre Theater — started coming together several years later, the actors and creative team got the message. They read the books. They reread the books. When faced with a question of what would happen next, who would say what, how to make something happen onstage — they went back to the books.

“It’s been fun to see the transition from the early, ‘Really? The movie didn’t work and now they’re making a musical?’ to, ‘Oh, this is made by people who love and understand what we love and understand about these stories,’” said Joe Tracz, who wrote the musical’s script.

The film made the characters older and lost the story’s adolescent spirit in the process. The musical returns to the eccentricity and silliness that got readers on board in the first place.

For newcomers, the opening number lays it out point blank: The Greek gods are real. They have kids. And being their kid — chased by monsters, ignored by all-powerful parents running the universe, put into constant mortal peril — tends to suck. (Angsty teens on Broadway — sound familiar?)

Percy Jackson, a son of Poseidon, is one of those kids. Having a learning disability and getting kicked out of six schools, as it turns out, are side effects of his mind being hard-wired for battle and reading ancient Greek.

He winds up at Camp Half-Blood, a safe-haven-slash-summer-camp for children of absentee deities, and embarks on a cross-country quest with the tough, brainy Annabeth and his goat-legged satyr pal Grover to recover Zeus’s stolen lightning bolt and save his mortal mom.

Social media-fueled teen musicals remain a gamble on the big stage of Broadway. “Be More Chill” — also written by Mr. Tracz and directed by Stephen Brackett — closed after several months, while “Dear Evan Hansen” has maintained its popularity for nearly three years.

“The Lightning Thief” played to just over half capacity last week, but the commitment to the original story seems to at least be paying off with fans. Wherever the show goes, a mini Comic Con of Percy Jackson fans follows, usually clad in the story’s signature orange Camp Half-Blood T-shirts — or, for at least one performance, furry homemade goat legs. (The show was featured at a session last Thursday at New York Comic Con itself, too.)

Mr. Riordan is known to avoid seeing adaptations of his work, and he isn’t planning on visiting the Longacre during the musical’s run, his publicist said. But his fans — from middle schoolers picking up the books for the first time to millennials who still reread the young adult novels as not-so-young adults — will find plenty that registers as familiar.

The first and last lines Percy has in the book are also the first and last lyrics he sings onstage, and our introduction to Annabeth — “You drool when you sleep,” she tells Percy — remains the same. Destinations will be familiar, whether a Las Vegas hotel where time stands still or the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where Percy faces his first monster on a school field trip.

There are also smaller hints, Easter eggs hidden onstage for the eagle-eyed. Mr. D, for example — the wine god Dionysus, whose punishment from Zeus in the novel includes an alcohol-free century — takes enraged swigs of a Diet Coke, a small but notable nod to the source material.

Fidelity to the source has been a priority from the start, but it hasn’t always been easy — especially as Mr. Tracz and the composer, Rob Rokicki, first packed a 375-page novel into the initial one-hour production with TheaterWorksUSA in 2014.

The show was expanded to a full, two-act musical for a brief run Off Broadway in 2017; it then toured the country before returning, this time on Broadway, in September. (It is scheduled to play through Jan. 5, which includes the lucrative holiday season.)

Through the show’s evolution, the minimalistic D.I.Y. aesthetic — a necessity in the early stages, Mr. Brackett said — has remained intact. In the book, Percy’s sea-god parentage lets him unleash a stream of toilet water to wallop a rival. But onstage, pressurized waterworks aren’t easy to come by — so Percy pelts her with a speedily unraveling, leaf-blower-propelled roll of toilet paper instead.

“It’s really capitalizing on having the audience use their imagination to fill in the blanks in the storytelling, which is one of the things that I thought was so beautiful about reading the novel,” Mr. Brackett said.

For fans still feeling burned by the movie, that spirit is a reassurance — a restoration of what the film lost. A 2014 New York Times review of the one-hour version said the show struck “a tone that’s sassy though not snarky, and energetic without being hectic.”

Chris McCarrell, who plays Percy, said the stage script refuses to let him or the other actors take themselves too seriously, which is appropriate.

“The magic of those books is the tone that does not waver the whole time,” he said. “This is a mess of a 12-year-old trying to figure out what is happening, which I love. And I try to keep that alive in the musical, which is pretty easy to do.”

The cardinal rule for the cast? “Don’t show Stephen something if you don’t want to put it in the show,” said Kristin Stokes, who has played Annabeth since the show’s inception.

“Trust me,” said Jorrel Javier, who plays both Grover and Mr. D. “If the choice that you made just happened to coincide with his vision, then sometimes you end up having to kick your leg to your face eight times a week.”